If AI destroys advanced civilizations, why wouldn't the machines survive and spread across the Galaxy?

Unlike biological life, AI wouldn't need habitable planets or life support.

Does AI really solve the Fermi paradox, or make it even harder to explain?

I explore this question here:

https://medium.com/@petrhula456/if-ai-wiped-out-the-aliens-where-are-the-machines-31ca33b7e5be

It appears to me that when people argue that life on Earth makes alien life across the universe likely, they almost always fall back on a sentence that sounds completely obvious on the surface: "We live on a planet, and we see billions of other planets, so why wouldn't there be life on other planets just like on this planet?" If you slow down and look at the mechanics of that sentence, almost all of its persuasive power comes from a subtle linguistic trick hidden inside a single word: "planet".

In astronomy, "planet" is just a broad human classification label. Under our naming rules, to get stamped with the noun "planet", an object only has to pass three minimal geometric and gravitational tests. The first, it orbits a star. Second, it is heavy enough for gravity to pull it into a roughly round shape. Third, it has cleared its orbital neighbourhood.

The bar is very low indeed.

Because the definition of "planet" is so broad, we toss completely different observations into the exact same verbal bucket. In our direct experience, Earth is a complex, teeming biosphere; liquid oceans, breathable atmosphere, fertile soil, plate tectonics, a protective magnetosphere, and millions of interlocking living species. In our own solar system, "planet" refers to dead irradiated rock (Mercury), a 460°C sulphuric-acid furnace (Venus), a frozen rusty desert (Mars), and crushing balls of hydrogen and methane gas (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). And outside our solar system ("exoplanets"), we don't even see rocks or spheres; in 99% of cases, what we actually observe is a 0.01% periodic dip in the pixel brightness of a distant point of light, or a tiny wobble in a spectral line, which we then extrapolate into "billions of planets".

Yet the moment human grammar stamps Earth and a 0.01% dip in a distant pixel with the identical noun ("planet"), our brains automatically assume that because they share the same label, they ought to share the same contents.

A ball of molten iron, a toxic gas giant, a sterile chunk of ice, a 0.01% dip in starlight, and our living Earth all get tossed into the exact same verbal bucket: "planet". Once Earth and a distant pixel-dip share the same noun ("planet"), our intuition treats them as members of a homogeneous kind, making it seem probable that complex properties of Earth (like life) should transfer to other members of the category.

In actuality, filling our living biosphere (N=1) and a billion uninspected rocks or pixel-dips under the same human noun ("planet") does zero physical work to make them alike.

You can close this sub now.

Also, it's not a paradox. It's just a question. At best, a mystery. And not even a good one. All the attempts at answering it, are collectively proving the very thing we're wondering.

All of the problems are real reasons. It's not one or the other. It's that there a hundred reasons why nobody's found us and why we've found nobody.

When people talk about the Fermi paradox, the discussion usually comes down to why we haven't found anybody. But I think there's a part of that question that doesn't get enough attention.

Even if extraterrestrial life or intelligence exists, that doesn't mean it produces evidence we can detect. And even if that evidence does reach us, how would we know we're looking at it? Those are two very different problems.

We search with instruments and methods built around what we already understand. We've made huge progress, and scientists do investigate unusual signals and observations, but there's a lot we don't know about what could be out there.

I'm not asking whether civilizations are hiding, whether they want to communicate, or whether they're millions of years ahead of us. I'm asking how we could actually improve our chances of recognizing something truly unfamiliar. And when we come up empty, how do we tell the difference between "probably nothing there" and "our methods couldn't have found it anyway"?

I'm more interested in the scientific side of this than in another theory about what aliens might be doing.

I joined because I thought there would be actually interesting ideas and discussion about the reasons for the Fermi Paradox.

Instead, it's:

1. People who are literally high posting what they thought about on their trips
2. Conspiracy theorists posting gibberish
3. People who heard about the Fermi Paradox 5 minutes ago posting their initial thoughts. When they could go to Wikipedia or YouTube to learn more about existing theories that overlap with their ideas.
4. Karma farmers or new age grifters trying to sell their books

Just shouting into the void but jeez this has to be one of the lower quality subs on reddit.

Fermi Paradox has the assumption that if an advanced extraterrestrial civilization discovered Earth, it would have some reason to interact with us. But what if they just… don’t?

Maybe an alien civilization visited Earth thousands of years ago, observed humanity, and concluded that we weren’t interesting or worth interacting with.

Maybe they arrived during World War II and decided, “Yeah, we want absolutely nothing to do with that.” Or maybe they visited millions of years before humans even existed, found a planet full of animals, and concluded there was nothing here that warranted further attention.

This imaginary hypothetical civilization that has mastered interstellar travel. It's possible that they have no need for our resourse or labor or find our ideas offer nothing of value to theirs

Maybe to them it's not worth the risk. They have observed a civilization that regularly engages in warfare, threatens itself with nuclear annihilation, destroys its own environment, and struggles to cooperate even within its own species. From the perspective of a civilization potentially millions of years more advanced, direct interaction would not seem worthwhile without some exchange. Not because we’re uniquely evil, but because the potential benefits of contacting us are negligible compared to the risks involved.

Also, observation doesn’t require interaction. Humans study animals in their natural environments without attempting to communicate with them or fundamentally alter their societies. Scientists observe, collect data, and try to understand their behavior without needing to directly interact or communicate with those animals. It's very possible an advanced civilization do something similar with us? Just sending small ships for observations and avoiding detection and direct contact. Plus, Humans hve already produced an enormous amount of digital information about our history/science/culture/politics/behavior. An advanced civilization may possess technology capable of gathering information without needing direct interaction or communication.

Maybe we’re simply not worth contacting.

Bottom line: the speed of light is really slow, and the distance to the nearest technological civilization is so unbelievably far away that we'll probably never even be able to detect them, much less communicate with them.

Planets, like ours, that have vast, lush, complex ecosystems are probably pretty rare in the universe. Most of the planets in the universe appear---based on what we know so far---to be basically dead rocks in space.

Look, we've discovered approximately 6,000 exoplanets. None of them is remotely Earth-like---in the sense that we could actually live there. Maybe microbes, but it's hard to imagine spacefaring civilizations, or even complex lifeforms, on any planet that's tidally locked to a red dwarf or has a surface gravity twice that of Earth.

Some people say that its impossible for an alien civilization (or whatever) to have reached Earth because the distances are too extreme. This comes from the assumptions based on a human lifetime and a misunderstanding of relativistic physics.

Humans have been around not very long compared to an alien civilization that is presumably much older. Inevitably, a civilization will produce measures of extending life and consciousness beyond what we know now, perhaps to extremes given enough time to develop. This is not science fiction, this *will* happen naturally as civilization develops to be more and more advanced.​​ It is just a question of resources, organization and the pursuit of science.

But that doesnt even matter for several reasons, one of which is autonomous probes. The other and more important one for this is the environment of spacetime at relativistic speeds. Reality and time itself warps at speeds close to light and causality, instead of going faster "physically" its time itself that warps to keep consistency with outside observers (like people on Earth).

The bottom line is:

A person going fast enough can travel to other star systems in short amounts of time, from their perspective.

The caveat is:

When they slow down again, everything else will have accelerated into the future as if they took the trip at "conventional" speeds.

It's entirely possible to just travel to other stars similar to a jet flight to another continent, if you have the technology to accelerate that fast. Just with a huge drawback of travelling far into the future. So the "its too far" argument isnt a reasonable one based on what is known about physics.

I wanted to share my view on this paradox to see if there are others holding same take. Very long post as I decided to take my time; a bit tricky to articulate.

Almost every discussion on this sub tries to solve the Fermi Paradox by proposing a new in-universe mechanism: Great Filters, the Dark Forest, the Zoo Hypothesis, Subsurface Oceans or Dyson-sphere virtual realities.

I want to test a completely different, epistemological take; one that asks whether the "Paradox" is a linguistic and methodological illusion created before we even look through a telescope.

Suppose we apply a strict three-part test for what makes any scientific claim about reality valid.

1. Does it have a "Where" and a "When"? (A specific coordinate in space and time).
2. Does it produce non-volitional sensory pushback? (A concrete measurement (like a flash on a detector screen, a radio signal, or an organism in front of us) that registers whether our theories like it or not).
3. If it is an abstract concept or unseen posit, can we unpack it into 1 and 2? Either as (3.a) a "verbal zip-file" summarising things we have already watched happen in space and time, or (3.b) a predictive mathematical recipe that connects a measurement here-and-now to a new sensory pushback (the way Pauli’s neutrino maths said: "Build a tank of water here at this time, and you will see this specific flash of light").

Now lets test Fermi "Paradox". The goal is to determine the exact point where a "paradox" occurs.

1. There is zero contradiction/paradox in our actual observations (Questions 1 & 2)

What do we actually observe in space and time?

On Earth, we observe living organisms and human beings building radios.

In the sky, our telescopes and antennas register 2D light smudges, spectral redshifts, and natural thermal/radio noise.

There is no contradiction whatsoever between "Life exists on Earth" and "Our telescopes register natural radiation in the sky." So no paradox yet.

1. Extrapolation A: "Septillions of observed Earths"

We never directly observe septillions of habitable rocky worlds. We observe tiny 2D smudges of light and periodic dips in starlight in our local patch, and then multiply them across the uninspected sky assuming uniformity. In technical terms, that is a regulative mathematical extrapolation. In other words, it is not something of a direct observation of ready-made habitats.

1. Extrapolation B: Abiogenesis and Macroevolution

To assert that the sky ought to be noisy with alien civilisations, there's an assumption that needs to be there beforehand without which the assertion is invalid.

**We have to assume that sterile chemicals automatically self-assemble into living cells (abiogenesis), and that single cells automatically transform into radio-building (alien) engineers.**

Now things begin to be interesting.

Does that assumption pass 3.a?

No. Because nobody has ever watched non-living chemicals turn into a living cell in space and time, nor watched a single cell build novel organ systems to become a primate.

Does it pass 3.b?

No. We have no differential equation or physical law that says: "Put sterile water, methane, and rock in a laboratory tank at t₀, and at t₁ the laws of physics compel a living cell (**let alone an engineer**) to appear."

That is the exact point where the supposed "paradox" arises.

1. The Drake Equation is not predictive physics

When people try to make this expectation look quantitative, they write down the Drake Equation: N = R⋆ · fₚ · nₑ · fₗ · fᵢ · f_c · L

In real physics (like electromagnetism or quantum mechanics), symbols in an equation represent measurable quantities constrained by strict conservation laws. In the Drake Equation, the last four variables (fₗ (abiogenesis), fᵢ (intelligence), f_c (communication), and L (lifetime)) have exactly zero empirical measurements behind them. Multiplying a measured star-formation rate by four completely made-up guesses is empirically empty.

1. Why “Solutions” to the Fermi Paradox are modern epicycles

In any other branch of science, if your hypothesis predicts a signal on a detector screen and the detector registers silence, you conclude that your hypothesis failed the test.

Only in the Fermi Paradox do people refuse to question the underlying narrative and instead invent untestable science-fiction excuses (hiding zookeepers (Zoo Hypothesis), paranoid genocidal probes (Dark Forest) or aliens uploading their "consciousness" into microscopic computer software (Matrioshka Brains)) to insulate an unverified assumption from falsification.

tldr: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/s/NoqKiro1Gf

Obviously sapient life is more rare than life in general by definition, but what I mean is, I believe that life itself may be extremely rare, but when it does emerge, the chance of becoming sapient is actually quite high.

My logic is essentially as follows:

1. It took several hundred million years for life on Earth to emerge the first time. This suggests that even with ideal conditions, getting all the right atoms/molecules together in just the right way to have a self-replicating thing is an extremely unlikely game of chance.
2. In fact, if you think about the random movement of molecules, you could make the argument that for thousands of atoms to come together in just the right way at just the right time, it's a probability of something like 1/(10^1000), as a debatable lower-bound order of magnitude, meaning that even with 10^80 atoms in the universe over 10^17 seconds the chance of it happening even a single time in the lifespan of the universe is incredibly low
3. However, once life does emerge, the powers of evolution and natural selection and incredibly powerful: once you have something capable of evolving, it can adapt to almost anything
4. Specifically, there was a clear pattern of life getting more complex, and more intelligent over time. Now obviously intelligence is not the local optimum for all evolutionary niches. But the history of evolution on Earth shows a clear trend of increased complexity and capacity for intelligence. You could even argue that a species like humans coming around eventually was pretty inevitable once multicellular organisms existed.
5. Following that logic, the fact that it took a few hundred million years for life to emerge, and a few billion for intelligent life to emerge after that, is not actually evidence that it's harder to get intelligent life given life than it is to get life given nothing.
6. Therefore, it's actually a pretty reasonable view that life itself is extremely rare, or even that Earth is alone in the universe, while intelligent life emerges with a high probability wherever life does exist.

I'm not married to this opinion, as I'm not an expert on these fields by any means, but I never see this perspective represented and I think it's at least a bit underexplored. Let me know if you have a takedown.

Edit: Pretty ridiculous that you guys just keep regurgitating the same two points "it took longer to get intelligent life" and "only 1-2 intelligent species out of billions" even though both are addressed by my argument. I wish you'd at least read my post before commenting and downvoting. Was hoping for better discussion on this sub...

Give me all the reasons I’ll argue them all

I’ve been thinking about a possibility that I find really interesting.
What if intelligent civilisations exist throughout the universe, and some of them already know about us, but deliberately avoid contacting humanity?
My idea is that, over billions of years, civilisations may have encountered each other many times. Some encounters might have led to wars, exploitation, the destruction of weaker civilisations, or attempts to steal resources and technology. Eventually, the more advanced civilisations might have realised that unrestricted contact can be dangerous for everyone involved.
Imagine that they created something like an intergalactic constitution — a set of universal rules regulating contact between civilisations.
One of those rules could be simple: don’t interfere with a civilisation that isn’t ready for contact.
Think about isolated human communities on Earth. We know that some exist, but we avoid contacting them because an encounter could endanger their way of life. Now imagine applying the same principle on a cosmic scale.
Perhaps advanced civilisations look at humanity and see a species that still wages wars, competes for resources, and struggles to cooperate even on its own planet.
Why would they give us technologies we couldn’t possibly understand or control? Why risk destabilising our entire civilisation? And if we cannot even travel to their worlds, what would meaningful contact look like in the first place?
Maybe they have established criteria for contact. Technological advancement could be one of them, but so could our ability to cooperate, manage resources without constant conflict, and coexist peacefully.
Perhaps they won’t contact us until we reach a certain level of maturity. Or perhaps their rule is that a civilisation must discover and reach out to them on its own.
I’m not claiming this is actually happening. It’s just a thought experiment inspired by the Fermi paradox.
But here’s the question I’m really interested in:
What if the reason we haven’t encountered extraterrestrial civilisations isn’t that they don’t exist, but that humanity hasn’t yet become a civilisation they are willing to contact?
And if an intergalactic organisation like this existed, what criteria do you think humanity would need to meet before being accepted into the wider cosmic community?

Any good depictions that aren’t humanoid? Videos would be great. I’ve seen the Melody Sheep and the rover/drone sent to an alien planet videos

But let me post them anyway

The first is about what happens when you use monte Carlos simulations instead of discrete values on the drake equation

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_pe9xzWADg&pp=0gcJCY8Co7VqN5tD

The second is from my favorite channel on this subject

Cool worlds. The site is one of the best I believe

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sT7V4gE4ZIc&pp=ygULY29vbCB3b3JsZHM%3D

e.... i don't know, im not an optimist